Saturday, February 28, 2015

A lovely Saturday for a card show

Great card show haul for me today! Bought a bunch of cards from the dimebox, nickelbox, fiddycentbox, and 3 relatively-pricier autos.

Let's start with those big money cards. I spent $15 total on these 3 cards.

Luis Torrens 2013 Bowman blue refractor auto #'d 148/150

LUUUUUUUUIIIIIIIIISSSSSS!!!!! I'm sure Zippy Zappy already has this parallel, so I got this one for myself. Zippy is a good judge of talent, so if he says this kid is going to be huge, I believe him and will invest my retirement fund on Luis Torrens cards. And I did good with this purchase. If you wanted to buy this card on eBay right now, the best you can do is $75 OBO for a PSA10, or $90 OBO for a raw copy (though, sure, they typically sell closer to $25 according to the completed auctions.)

Yeison Asencio 2013 Bowman gold refractor auto #'d 31/50

Never heard of this guy, but hey, he's a Padres farmhand and these gold refractors are nice-looking cards and not easy to come by. Checking out his stats, he had a nice 2014 season, batting .291 with 15 homers split between AA and AAA. Hopefully he keeps that up in 2015 and maybe cracks the bigs. Copies of this card are on eBay now for $150 OBO, but completed auctions show it selling for closer to $10.

Rafael Montero 2013 Bowman auto

I got this card basically thrown in. I had offered $10 for the Luis and the gold Padre together (a bit of a lowball, I'll admit); the dealer countered with $15 and I could throw in one of the other cheaper autos; I agreed and I picked this one since I've at least heard of this guy.

So yeah, that was a nice purchase. It was actually my last deal of the day, but I'll backtrack to my bin digs in the coming few days to show off my other pickups. Good stuff-- stay tuned! But that's it for today.

On a side note the Asensio and Monteros were pretty great pickups too. Congrats.

Asensio was one of the top 20 prospects in the Padres org a couple of years ago. He projects to be an outfielder with decent power and decent defense (he's definitely a corner outfielder though). Last season he took a pretty large step forward and was even promoted to triple-a. Although one crucial thing going forward with him will be his plate discipline. He made contact a lot in 2014 but he also struck out 11.7% of the time in double-A. Seeing his walk rate improve wouldn't hurt either.

As for Montero he was one of the many right handed hurlers that had Mets fans excited for the future. He's a bit of a flyball pitcher and projects to be a solid end of the rotation starter (think a number 4 or number 5 type). His 2014 debut was less than stellar and due to a pitching surplus he might have to start the 2015 season as a reliever but he'll be an important piece of the Mets' youth movement in the starting rotation going forward.

"Sponsors"

Do you ever buy stuff on Amazon? If so, please get there through this link to Amazon. If you do, I get a small percentage worth of store credit! Win-win!

Also, are you an employer? I would love to break into a career along the lines of this blog: writing, designing, marketing in a field of sportscards or sports in general. So if you're hiring for something cool like that, please get in touch! I currently live in Portland, OR and am not looking to relocate at this time, but I'd be great at working remotely.